


The End or The Beginning

by Wolf_Keryon7



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bellamione Cult's May Event 2020, Discord: Bellamione Cult, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:22:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24321979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolf_Keryon7/pseuds/Wolf_Keryon7
Summary: "You touch me and suddenly I feel a little less war torn. I’m not sure what peace is supposed to feel like but I think it may feel a lot like you."— anatomy-of-rains  (via wnq-writers)
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Bellatrix Black Lestrange
Kudos: 80





	The End or The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> So there should probably be some sort of trigger warnings that go along with this but I'm not sure what fits? There's description of a panic attack, and some pretty heavy feelings involved in this but it's also a bit of a mess cause I wrote it one go and it kinda ran away from me and now I don't want to look at it again for a little bit.

They’d won. It was over. She’d survived.

So why did it feel like the bloody, broken parts of her would never heal? Why did it feel like she would carry the burdens of this day around with her for the rest of her life, never free to enjoy the peace she’d spent half her life fighting for.

Nothing made sense. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. The school a pile of rubble at her back, the forest on fire to her right, the lake stained red with the blood running down the grounds to her left.

Harry had stood before her barely an hour ago, wild hair plastered to his face in a macabre gel of blood, sweat and mud, eyes hollow with the grief of the fight and knowledge of everything he’d done to get to this point.

The sweet boy she’d met seven years ago on the Hogwarts Express lay dead somewhere in the forest and this shell of him stood in his place. 

His hands still shook and his shoulders strained with the tension he didn’t seem capable of releasing and Hermione had touched his forearm with trembling, aching fingers and pressed her forehead to his chest and wished and wished that there was anything she could do.

Ron was in the Great Hall, the only part of the castle still standing it seemed, physically untouched by the carnage, but the bodies that lay strewn across it’s floor were an altogether other matter of horror. 

The freckles on his face stood in stark relief against the paleness of his skin, his eyes sunken, deep purple bruises pressed into their sockets. A patchwork of mottled black and blue covered his neck from a struggle with Fenrir Greyback and the bite the still seeped blood into his t-shirt had left his right arm useless.

His mother had barely moved from Fred’s side, had sat beside him even as the battle raged around her, and by some unspoken law that everyone had respected, no one had gone near her. Not a single spell had gone within two feet of the grieving woman, and when it was all over her family had flocked to her and stayed there now, standing a silent vigil over the brother and son they had lost.

Her friends, the few who remained, had taken shelter in the Hall. They needed the reprieve, however brief, from the obvious marks of the war. 

Students, children who should have never been involved in this travesty of a ‘revolution’, sat in clumps of bodies, pressed tightly against friend and stranger alike as they sought comfort in the face of a comfortless terror that likely would never leave them.

Hermione gasped, hands clawing at her throat as air stuck there and refused to move, her lungs burned and her vision blurred around the edges and she struggled to think past the ringing in her ears enough to remind herself to breathe out.

They’d won. It was over. She’d survived.

The mantra repeated on a loop through her head, but it was all empty words. She’d worked so hard to get them here, to keep them alive long enough to see it through, to be good enough, strong enough, smart enough to keep the ones she loved safe.

And in the end, she’d been mostly successful. 

Harry, Ron, Ginny, Luna, Neville, her parents. The list of people she loved who would see tomorrow went on. 

But at what price? They were not untouched, not unbroken by the savage acts they had witnessed, had experienced, had committed. None of them would ever be the same. 

Still, inbetween it all, was the aching, longing, pain that had never settled in her chest. She was dead, Hermione was sure. Fallen to the wand of some nameless, faceless Death Eater that had fallen themselves moments later to Hermione’s own wand.

Maybe that was why she felt she’d find peace, never feel whole again. 

Bellatrix Black was dead, buried somewhere in the rubble of a once great and aweing castle. 

All at once her breath rushed back to her. Great, heaving gulps of air that wracked her frame and rattled her bones. Her stomach churned angrily, clenching around nothing even as she gagged and fell to her knees.

It was all for nothing in the end. All the people she’d saved, kept alive, and as safe as was possible and dragged, kicking and screaming and begging to be left behind at points, to the end, and she’d lost the one who meant the most to her.

The one who kept her breathing when life threatened to choke her. The one who saved her over and over in so many little ways that Hermione had always known she’d never be able to repay her in entirety. The one who kept her safe, made her feel safe, promised only ever to be a point of safety in the storm that was their lives.

The Slytherin had been a source of contention, and challenge, and passion for so many years. They’d met and instantly clashed, two tiny first years with wild hair and insatiable thirsts for knowledge, from different worlds. 

Different sides of the same coin as they’d slowly discovered throughout their years at Hogwarts.

In fourth year, that moment they’d shared at the yule ball had changed their entire relationship, put their worlds on a tilt and irrevocably altered their lives, for the better.

But was it better, when Bellatrix lay lifeless behind her, and Hermione couldn’t gather the strength to lift herself from her weary knees and find the woman she’d promised to love for the rest of time between breathless kisses.

They’d won. It was over. She’d survived.

Yet Hermione had lost everything. Her torment had only just begun. She’d never live.

The sky darkened around her and she felt herself shiver in the frigid wind that ripped across the surface of a lake black as its name, but she didn’t feel the cold.

She stared out at the sky and traced constellations with eyes that burned with a lack of tears.

How long had she been out here, sat in the remains of a bloody, hard fought battle, waiting for something, anything, to happen that would drag her from this awful, empty feeling?

There was a vague memory of Harry trying to take her inside with him when he’d left, but she’d shuck her head and gazed out at nothing, wrapping her arms around herself in a feeble attempt to hold herself together.

This was the cost of war. An excruciating pain only overshadowed by the absolute numbness she wore in effort to suppress it. 

Her mind tumbled about itself, a million scenarios playing out before her, a thousand what if’s and a thousand more why’s. A voice shouted in the distant, piercing the night in a way that made Hermione flinch, sensitive to everything.

Heart thudding harshly against her chest she found the strength miraculously to drag herself to her feet, fingers gripping her wand so hard her knuckles popped. Her teeth pressed against each other in a way that made her jaw throb but she ignored it and glared out into the darkness that surrounded her.

She wondered briefly how it was that moments before she’d felt like a hollow shell of a person, someone who would never find the strength again to move from the spot she’d fallen into, and know she stood, tense, ready, adrenaline coursing through her veins in a way that made her giddy.

A brutal and terrible smirk twisted her lips and her magic cracked at the edges of her being, thick on her tongue and filling her with an echo of the glee it used to, but it was different now, warped and cracked and it pulled heavily at her.

Pushing that thought to the back of her mind she turned slowly, scanning her surroundings. The night had fallen silent again, but Hermione couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched, approached.

She fought against the urge to shout out, demand that whoever was out there reveal themselves, bit her tongue and tightened the muscles in her wrist in an effort not to lash out with devastating spells.

Anyone could be approaching her, and the knowledge that it may be an ally sat bitter next to the thought that it may just as easily be an enemy. She cursed herself for her carelessness. The war was over, but their enemies remained.

Nothing was resolved, not truly, not permanently, and she’d left herself vulnerable and alone, unthinking and uncaring of the danger she left so close to those she’d thought saved. How would Harry react to her death or capture? Or Ron, or Ginny, or Neville? 

She’d been thoughtless and reckless and it was going to bite her in the arse now.

Her body buzzed in preparation for the fight, every synapse and neuron in her brain firing rapidly as she assessed and planned and waited. The numbness was replaced with a cold fury, the pain pushed away and forgotten in the face of a new threat.

Shifting slowly forward, Hermione made her way toward where she thought the voice had come from, ears straining against the silence for any hint of her stalker. Her skin still pricked uncomfortably with the feeling of being observed and she shuddered heavily at the whisper of the wind against the back of her neck.

The night broke again, and Hermione stopped dead in her tracks as an achingly familiar voice rang out through it, her name on lips she’d thought she’d never know again.

Her heart thumped once, twice, and fell silent to the pound of her feet against the grass. Her lungs screamed for air but she couldn’t breath, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything until she knew for certain.

She volleyed a crumbling wall, bricks and mortar and stone blasted away by some spell hours prior and skidded down what was once a corridor, but was now a torn apart path of dust and rubble with low, jagged walls and no roof.

Blood made the ground slick beneath her and Hermione slipped twice as she raced through familiar and yet alien halls. It could be a trick, it could be a trap, it could be her shattered psyche mocking her. She had to know either way.

Doors and archways blurred past her, her head spun as she searched for the spot where she’d seen her go down. The spot she was sure she’d lost her for good. 

The beat of her feet against the stone ground was deafening, and her head swam from a lack of oxygen, so the collision was unexpected when it happened.

She’d turned too quickly around a corner and hit something hard enough to be sent sprawling a foot back, air rushing past her lips to rattle around her lungs as stars exploded behind her eyes when she landed against the unyielding floor.

Sitting up was automatic, wand held before her and pointed at something she couldn’t quite make out through the black spots racing across her vision. Her ears rang in a distant way that told her she’d hit her head hard when she landed, but she ignored it as she breathed through her nose and shuffled back to pull herself to her feet.

Vertigo tugged at the edges of her mind as she stood, the black spots in her eyes expanding to leave her in a darkness that stalled her pounding heart and slicked her palms with sweat, but she rolled her wand between her fingers and grit her teeth until it passed.

The sight that greeted her left in her a confusing mix of longing for that darkness and joy at it’s passing.

Bellatrix stood before her, pale, bloody, bruised and dirty. Lips cracked and split and pulled into the infuriating, beautiful smirk. Her hair smoldered still in places, magic leaving a burn that didn’t leave so easy as fire, but full and bouncing in it’s curls. 

Her eyes pierced through Hermione, past the layers of grime and heartache that covered her like a blanket down to her battered soul and it was like a balm to her.

The feeling of being watched abandoned her in the face of the one who had been watching and Hermione knew the shorter woman had been searching for her magic, pulling at it with her own to lead her here.

Her knees shook and her fingers trembled, the wand she’d gripped like a lifeline falling with a muted clatter to the floor by her feet as she drew in the first full breath she’d taken in hours, her lungs quieting their screams and her heart beating strong behind her ribs.

She took a step forward, eyes glued to the other woman, taking in the cut on her temple that streaked blood down the left side of her face, the brutal bruise that covered her jaw and extended down her neck to flutter over the exposed skin of her shoulder and collarbone.

Hermione felt it like a physical weight being lifted from her, her steps were lighter, easier as she took them. And when she raised her hand to brush her fingers against a pale cheek the trembling stopped. 

Warmth exploded through her as she pressed her body into Bellatrix, eyes flitting all over her face in silent awe. 

When she pressed her lips against the smirk the shorter woman wore she ached all over again, but this time it was a delicious ache, one that doubled and tripled and thrummed through her whole body as Hermione felt her kiss back, felt long, pale fingers tangle into the mess that was her hair and the stuttered breath that dragged over her top lip.

It was like a switch that only Bellatrix could flip, like a light that broke the darkness that only resided with the dark witch, as Hermione breathed her in and wrapped herself tighter around her frame and smiled against the column of her throat.

She was still broken. Still forever haunted by the horrors of everything she’d lived through. And everything still hurt so sharply that the blanket of numbness she’d worn fluttered at the edges of her mind in a taunting way. 

But it all seemed so much more doable, it seemed survivable, with the knowledge that Bellatrix was in fact alive, was holding her in a crushing grip to her chest as she breathed deeply against the top of her head and swayed them where they stood.

The jagged parts of her that had fluttered in the breeze caught against the jagged parts of Bellatrix as she met her dark eyes desperately, and it wasn’t fixed, it wasn’t healed, and it still seemed like maybe it never would be.

That was okay though, with Bellatrix she didn’t need to be whole and undamaged, just like the dark witch was free to be as broken and damaged as she was with Hermione, because together they made a whole. 

Still a little damaged, a little broken, not all of the pieces fitting exactly right, and far from perfect, but everything they needed all the same. They resonated on the same wavelength, moving at the same speed and breathing in the same patterns and that was everything.

They’d won. It was over. She’d survived.

And with Bellatrix by her side, it would be okay, not immediately, not even soon, but it would be okay. She could live and love and heal, and watch the woman she loved live and love and heal alongside her, and that in itself soothed her torn edges and warmed her through.

She'd never escape what she'd done, none of them would, but they could carve out little moments of peace for themselves surely. And this moment, with Bellatrix holding her, seeing her, knowing her and loving her, despite it all, or maybe because of it, was the closest she'd felt to peace in years, and that would be okay too.


End file.
